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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Why I Hate Valentine's Day

I’m pretty good at complaining about every holiday that our society has invented, but nothing beats the pettiness and lameness of Valentines Day. There is no other holiday that is so completely heteronormative and not to mention monogamously individualistic…what I mean by that is that the world separates into twos for the day. Though Christmas is capitalistic it has elements of unity and giving that make it half-way redeemable. Valentine’s Day is a holiday for suckers. If you are in a loving respectful relationship V-Day is pointless. It exists to make singles feel desperate and out of the heteronormative loop that they are supposed to fit into. It is a cop-out for people who are not romantically creative; men who can’t come up with a better day to propose and the women who expect to get the bling bling or else.

Though I am sure some people are perfectly content with monogamy I think it is presumptuous to think that most people can be happy spending their entire lives with just one person, especially since we have the potential to live so long. People change, and even if people don’t change a couple consists of TWO people and those two people have different interests, whether they want to admit to them or not. And because their interests are different they may not always agree upon doing those things together, thus they need FRIENDS. Friends are people you are attracted to, maybe not sexually, but at least attracted in some way. Where do we, as a society, draw the line between friends and “more than friends”? If the friend’s hand touches our body somewhere that gives up a warm fuzzy feeling in our genital regions? How silly does that sound? How problematic is it for someone we love to share their love with someone else? Is there really not enough love to go around? Do we really only have enough love within us to give it to one person at one time and if so what is this love thing we’re talking about? What does it consist of? Support, communication, laughter, shared experiences, touching, caressing, dealing with life’s bullshit. Are those qualities in limited quantities?

Do we really need a separate day out of the year in which to prove that we do this 364 other days out of the year? And does it really need to be confined to couples? If it were a day to be extra loving and lovely to everyone, if we all had chocolate parties and champagne keggers, where everyone got a card expressing love than maybe it would be a holiday worth celebrating. But the pressure to conform to monogamous normality bores me. It’s predictable, it lacks creativity; it lacks actual thought, and forces love that may or may not be there.

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About Me

I have my Master of Arts degree in Women and Gender Studies as well as a Master's in Writing and Publishing from DePaul.
I'm currently living in Boulder, CO working for a non-profit called Fertile Action and writing about visual arts (and more) for the Boulder Weekly.
Why blog?
I think too much, hence I decided I need a space to get it all out; and there is no better space than a virtual one.